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Perplexity is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join the API Platform team, responsible for designing, building, and operating mission-critical APIs that deliver frontier AI intelligence to thousands of customers including startups, enterprises, and governments.
In this role, you'll work across a diverse technical portfolio spanning distributed systems, performance optimization, agent orchestration, and emerging AI infrastructure challenges. You'll be tasked with designing elegant, developer-friendly APIs that expose Perplexity's core capabilities—from exabyte-scale knowledge retrieval to long-horizon agent orchestration—while maintaining exceptional latency, throughput, and reliability.
Key responsibilities include:
- Architecting and implementing high-performance APIs that serve as building blocks for frontier intelligence
- Optimizing for low latency and high throughput through aggressive performance tuning across the stack
- Anticipating future customer needs and evolving system architectures to meet exponential growth in customers, agents per customer, and compute/retrieval demands
- Hardening security and reliability across heterogeneous compute environments
- Collaborating cross-functionally to integrate novel frontier capabilities and improve existing API offerings
- Maintaining engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality standards, and documentation
You'll need 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python, Go, or Rust, with deep expertise in high-traffic API design (schema evolution, versioning, idempotency, authentication, rate limiting, performance tuning). Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred) with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices is essential. Experience with modern AI APIs—including latency optimization, streaming, model orchestration, and emerging standards—is highly valued. Strong product sense and customer empathy are critical to ensure the APIs you build are ergonomic, well-documented, and easy to adopt.
About Perplexity AI
AI / Data / Infrastructure — AI answer engine and search product for consumers and enterprises.
